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2025 Fedecan Instance Census is now open (survey.fedecan.ca)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca

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Link: https://survey.fedecan.ca//s/cmjcnqzgd0002th01dh6naqm6

The census will close on January 15th, 2026.

A lot has changed since our last census in 2023! We would like to take another opportunity to learn about our growing community.

Everyone is welcome to fill out this survey. You do not need to be located in Canada, and you do not need to have an account on one of our platforms. If you do have an account on lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works, piefed.ca, and/or pixelfed.ca, you can indicate that on the census in order to be included in those separate graphs/visualizations.

No question is mandatory. You may skip any question by either selecting “no answer (skip this question)”, or by leaving the question blank. Some questions will be hidden depending on your selections. For example, the Pixelfed specific questions will be hidden if you don't select that as one of the platforms you use.

Sections:

Section 1: Location
Section 2: Demographics
Section 3a: Instance Usage (Forum/Threadiverse)
Section 3b: Instance Usage (Pixelfed)
Section 4: Feedback / Closing questions

When results are ready, we will share them on our website and with posts on:

The questions were created with help from @Dave@lemmy.nz, based on the questions from their census this year :)

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[–] DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Two issues:

You can choose all answers on multiple choice questions, including choices that are mutually exclusive.
a lack of definitions of terms. Is a town with 150 people "urban" because you have a street address and most people don't work in another town/city, is it "suburban" because you need to go to a different town to buy groceries, or is it "rural" because that's how most people who live there self-identify?

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

You can choose all answers on multiple choice questions, including choices that are mutually exclusive.

I'll have to add that to my review checklist for next time. At least one of those was an error (ex. It doesn't make sense to be in multiple levels of school currently). For others, it would be clearer to have a single selection with an option for "both about equally" (ex. Desktop vs. mobile usage).

a lack of definitions of terms. Is a town with 150 people "urban" because you have a street address and most people don't work in another town/city, is it "suburban" because you need to go to a different town to buy groceries, or is it "rural" because that's how most people who live there self-identify?

Many of those questions are intended to be self-identification, but we could have said that explicitly so that people aren't uncertain. The reasons we didn't have set definitions:

People disagree on which definition/method is most appropriate, and we haven't had the capacity to properly weigh the options / determine what value each definition might provide over the others.
It seems that people are more curious about the self-identified groupings than the exact details. Both factor in to what the online experience is like, but the self-identification would play a larger role?
Privacy. We want people to feel comfortable answering questions, without worrying that someone will figure out their real identity by aggregating the answers. It's much harder to do that if it's uncertain on why the user answered the way that they did.

Still, we are open to adding definitions to questions where it would make more sense to do so. For example, we added the fast.com and census/gov Canada links this time. Otherwise we can explicitly say that users should answer based on self-identification.

I appreciate the feedback! I've noted this down for next time